Help with storage on my Mac

I know you guys probably don’t care or what to help with this, but I got taken down in the support communities because I simply run a beta version (didn’t even discuss it), but here we go.

So, as a friendly warning, my rule of thumb is that you shouldn't install our betas on a machine unless you’re willing to erase the entire contents of that machine. By definition, our beta releases are not stable, well-tested releases intended to be run on production hardware.

**My MacBook Air has multiple accounts, and the other users & shared category takes up 100+ gb. When I sign into one of the accounts, that 100+ gb gets moved to System Data. When I look in Finder, the user only seems to take up 12 gb, though. I’ve shown hidden items and looked through the library, but it’s not showing anything that’s taking up that much space! **

A few points here:

• How data is classified partly depends on the access permission of the user, which means data can shift into other categories simply because that user has limited access to that data.

• Note that this issue particularly affects the Finder, since it can't tell you the size of a directory it doesn't have access to.

• The nature of file cloning on APFS VASTLY complicates storage usage calculations in ways that aren't easy to account for. Case in point, I have a massive test hierarchy (several million files) that has a logical size of ~200 TB, which is a bit odd given that I only have a 1 TB drive in the machine.

• Our storage calculator tries to account for these, but I wouldn't assume it's perfect, particularly on a beta release.

In terms of places storage can "hide":

• The terminal command "diskutil ap list" will show you the full volume configuration of all APFS volumes, including snapshots. Time Machine handles snapshots purging automatically, but "tmutil" can manually remove them.

• If you're running as root, the command line tool "du" can calculate the space used by any hierarchy. However, note that it does not account for file clone double counting, so it will overestimate the size of a directory hierarchy full of clones.

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Kevin Elliott
DTS Engineer, CoreOS/Hardware

I’m really confused I’ve never really been a developer or used these forums it’s just that I can’t post this in the normal forums. I don’t have any Time Machine snapshots and haven’t made any new APFS Volumes besides simulators (Is there a rare to eject them when not in use??? They take up ~30 gb, which is most likely not the problem as the problem is 100+ gb) here’s a screenshot of the command "diskutil ap list":

I‘m not running as root, is that the same or different from the root user? Should I use the root user to try to find what’s taking up that storage?

Turns out it was a corrupted icon store and I couldn’t see it until I logged into the root user. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253834128